17 Hours of JavaScript from the Masters

Douglas Crockford. John Resig. Peter-Paul Koch. Nicolas C. Zakas. If you recognize these names, you probably know what they all have in common: they're amazingly talented JavaScript Developers. Today, you'll hear from all of them, in this roundup of JavaScript presentations. Be ready to stretch your brain!

1: Javascript: The Good Parts

Length: 1 hour, 3 minutes
Speaker: Douglas Crockford
Slides (powerpoint)

Is JavaScript a hopeless mess, or a robust and flexible standard? In this presentation, Douglas Crockford, the world’s foremost authroity on JavaScript, will try and convince you that the language is worth your time. This is a great video, and everyone coming to JavaScript for the first time should watch it! You might also want to check out Crockford’s book by the same title. (Here’s another instance of the same talk.)

2: The JavaScript Programming Language

Length: 1 hour, 51 minutes
Speaker: Douglas Crockford
Slides (zip)

This is the first session in Crockford’s JavaScript Trilogy. In this talk, he’ll walk you through many of the features in JavaScript, as well as discuss the language itself and some JS programming styles. Here’s another great watch for newcomers!

3: An Inconvenient API: The Theory of the DOM

Length: 1 hour, 18 minutes
Speaker : Douglas Crockford
Slides (zip)

While this video isn’t focused on JavaScript, it’s the second part of Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript Trilogy. You’ll hear about the browser, why it is the way it is, and a few of the key concepts behind it. Of course, it’s all very relevant to JavaScript Developers.

4: Advanced JavaScript

Length: 1 hour, 7 minutes
Speaker: Douglas Crockford
Slides (zip)

This is the final installment to Crockford’s trilogy. Moving up to advanced concepts, this video will introduce you to topics such as inheritance, debugging, and efficiency.

5: Games, Performance, TestSwarm

Length: 1 hour, 11 minutes
Speaker: John Resig
Slides (slideshare)

John Resig, the creator of jQuery, knows what he’s talking about. In this presentation, which he gave at JSConf 2009, he talked about measuring performance in JavaScript (including an intro to the pros and cons of benchmarking), as well as JavaScript games and distributed testing.

6: Speed Up Your JavaScript

Length: 56 minutes
Speaker: Nicholas C. Zakas
Slides (slideshare)

Nicolas Zakas is the author of “Professional JavaScript for Developers” and co-author of “Professional Ajax.” This talk is all about performance, and you’ll hear the low down in the areas of scope, data access, loops, and the DOM.

7: Best Practices in JavaScript Library Design (or Building a JavaScript Library)

Length: 1 hour, 1 minute
Speaker: John Resig
Slides (slideshare)

Ever wanted to build your own JavaScript Library? John Resig talks about the princples of doing so in this Google Tech Talk. He covers the whole spectrum from designing a good API to maintaining the library, with implementing, debugging, and testing (just to name a few!) in the middle.

8: Drop-In JavaScript Performance (or Perfomance Improvements in Browsers)

Length: 1 hour, 2 minutes
Speaker: John Resig
Slides (slideshare)

In this video, John Resig goes through some of the latest and greatest in the world of JavaScript and DOM performance. Although this type of talk goes out of data somewhat quickly (the browser speed stats are pretty stale), there's still a lot to look forward to here!

9: JavaScript Events

Length: 55 Minutes
Speaker: Peter-Paul Koch
Slides (pdf)

Peter-Paul Koch is a professional front-end engineer from the Netherlands. He's done an enormous ammount of CSS and JavaScipt browser testing and has published the charts on his website, Quirksmode. This talk is a JavaScript Events Theory Class given at Yahoo!.

10: Scalable JavaScript Application Architecture

Length: 52 minutes
Speaker: Nicolas C. Zakas
Slides (slideshare)

This is a great theory presentation; Nicolas Zakas talks about JavaScript architecture. You'll learn how to separate modules on a page, how to get them to interact with other modules that they don't know exist, and more JS goodness.

11: ECMA Harmony and the Future of JavaScript

Length: 1 hour, 6 minutes
Speaker: Brendon Eich

You may not have heard of Brendon Eich before, but he's the man who started it all: the creator of JavaScript. In this talk, he goes into a bit of language history, as well as talking about what's coming in the ECMAScript 5 proposal.

12: The State and Future of JavaScript

Length: 55 minutes
Speaker: Douglas Crockford
Slides (powerpoint)

JavaScript hasn’t changed in almost a decade; so what’s going on? In this talk, Douglas Crockford explains some of JavaScript’s history, the battles fought in the past years, and what the standard could look like in the (relatively) near future. Yes, this is quite similar to Brendan's talk (which was actually given the evening before), but this one has that Crockford theoretical slant to it.